Automatic Summarization of Events from Social Media

Social media services such as Twitter generate phenomenal volume of content for most real-world events on a daily basis. Digging through the noise and redundancy to understand the important aspects of the content is a very challenging task. We propose a search and summarization framework to extract relevant representative tweets from a time-ordered sample of tweets to generate a coherent and concise summary of an event. We introduce two topic models that take advantage of temporal correlation in the data to extract relevant tweets for summarization. The summarization framework has been evaluated using Twitter data on four real-world events. Evaluations are performed using Wikipedia articles on the events as well as using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) with human readers (MTurkers). Both experiments show that the proposed models outperform traditional LDA and lead to informative summaries.